SELF-PUBLISHING = SPEED

If time is of the essence in reaching your readers then take the alternative publishing route, but don’t cut corners.

There’s something exciting about being able to create a product – for your book is that – and get it to market at a good lick. It used to be a year, sometimes two, for a book to make its way through the publishing channels and out to the shops.

Nowadays, once the text is edited and formatted and the jacket illustration approved, e-publishing takes a matter of hours and print-on-demand a matter of days. It’s so darn simple. No doubt in a year or so it will be done in the blink of an eye.

The flipside, of course, is that you’re not featured in a publisher’s catalogue, so your book is unlikely be purchased by the library service. Your print-on-demand book is just that – so you are unlikely to find it on booksellers’ shelves. If customers find you, they will have to order your book. And any publicity will be all your own doing.

But – if agents keep a weather-eye on up-and-coming e-book authors, what’s the point of wasting months sending them your precious manuscript, unless you are known to them or have some kind of connection. Sending an agency your manuscript blind is the literary equivalent of cold calling – and the hit rate is miniscule. The chances are your book will join the slush pile and you’ll wait months before you receive a rejection slip.

In those months, and the months that follow as you send it out to another agency, you might as well have published it yourself. Then you can send the paperback to the agent instead.

But be warned. An independent bookseller friend told me he would never take a book that didn’t have a good jacket – even if the writing was okay. We live in a visual society, so get the best illustrator and designer you can afford (and that’s after the best editor – and a formatting expert is not an editor, whatever they will tell you).

You can publish your book for peanuts or you can see it as an investment. The global market is a big place and your book could be out there a long time. It might, even, get picked up by a top publisher. My advice is to get it out there, but don’t cut corners.